Fintech, Life.SREDA Releases The Future of Money 2015

Russian venture capital firm Life.SREDA released its annual report on the state of the fintech industry.

According to the document, main trends in 2014 included:
– vc investments tripled, amounting to a total of $6,8 Billion.
– two IPOs took place (Lending Club, the p2p-lending platform, and Ondeck, the online lending service for SMEs).
– Unicorns grew from 3 Square, Lending Club, Stripe, to 10 adding Transferwise, Kreditech, CreditKarma, Wonga, Powa, SoFi and Raise in 2014.
– Apple is now involved having launched its mobile wallet Apple Pay.
– China is advancing with E-commerce giant Alibaba undertaking the most expensive IPO ever and the country launching a $6,5 Billion venture capital firm for fintech and biotech startups.
– mPOS is the fastest growing fintech sector with major drivers being the service easy to explain to both SME customers and private individuals, and that fact that it connects new online opportunities with traditional offline infrastructure.

Among the trends of 2015, the report includes:
– Services will have the same functionality for large and small companies, businesses and individuals.
– Transition from individual services to ecosystems with major integration of mPOS services, offline payments, credit, loyalty programs, analytical platforms and websites and applications constructors.
– The growth of the Asian Markets
– The boom of startups dedicated to customer analytics and internal analytics of companies.
– Implementation of p2p-transfer services in instant messengers, social networks and other platforms that have a critical mass of users.
– Commercialization of products in the field of offline mobile payments with the incresing importance of NFC, QR, BLE and payment cards.
– Further development of wallets and payment applications which automatically identify the user at various venues.
– Telecommunication companies launching banking services
– Decrease of speculative operations and improving perception of Bitcoin.